Sun has contributed a lot to FOSS in later years, and that's splendid. It seems, though, that they're targeting Linux as they're rival when pushing the Solaris OS. Wouldn't it be better if supporters united against Windows and Mac, instead of fighting eachother for that lousy one percent marketshare?

I don't think that's a concern. IBM, currently a 'good mate' to the Linux movement, advertises AIX over Linux for certain high-end requirements. If a company starts spreading FUD about Linux then, yes, that's a problem -- but promoting their own products is no big deal.

M-Saunders wrote:I don't think that's a concern. IBM, currently a 'good mate' to the Linux movement, advertises AIX over Linux for certain high-end requirements. If a company starts spreading FUD about Linux then, yes, that's a problem -- but promoting their own products is no big deal.

M

S'pose you're right, Mike. I'll even admit that, although I use OpenSUSE 10.2, I too have taken Sun up on they're offer and ordered a free DVD, just to see what it is. One should think, though, that with Solaris 10 being a two years old OS, it would look a bit stale compared to the newer Linux distros.

Hasn't Solaris 10 been free beer for some time. I know I picked a copy for a look. Much more conservative than Linux, the default shell is cruelly rubbish with it's lack of a command history or tab completion. Hell you couldn't even edit the middle of a command by pressing back (you can default to bash of course). Lack of driver support as well although they do use a stable ABI and Solaris 8 drivers run fine in Solaris 10 (which is how I got my NIC running).

As for age, if you can get hardware support you can install all the modern X11/POSIX software you want. I know there are Firefox 2 and OOo packages out there for it but you can always do things the old fashioned way. The default Java Desktop seems too full of Suns advertising junk to stick with, the other environment they use is CDE.

I downloaded Solaris 10 last year... I'm running it on an early AMD64 that I failed to get any 64-bit version of Linux to run properly on (the fault is with the hardware, not Linux). But Solaris just works with it... this machine is now destined to replace the old SuSE 8.2 box I'm running as the office Samba server.

Solaris is one of the operating systems I program for, usually Solaris 8 or 9 on Sparc hardware. It's rock solid reliable in the same way that *BSD is. I quite like the Java desktop in Solaris 10 - it's a big improvement over CDE (I never did understand why they dropped OpenWindows for CDE). Containers look interesting too - SUN's take on virtualisation. Haven't had time to play with them yet.

Just remember when making comparisons with Linux, Solaris is more akin to RHEL or SLED than *buntu or Mandriva.